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Wednesday, May 24, 2006
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Thomas Sowell (via Townhall.com): "The immigration bill before Congress has some of the most serious consequences for the future of this country. Yet it is not being discussed seriously by most politicians or most of the media. Instead, it is being discussed in a series of glib talking points that insult our intelligence.
"Some of the most momentous consequences -- a major increase in the number of immigrants admitted legally -- are not even being discussed at all by those who wrote the Senate bill, though Senator Jeff Sessions has uncovered those provisions in the bill and brought them out into the light of day."
Read the whole thing, it's worth your time. Thanks to Blogs for Bush for the link.
"2008 pres"
6:27:21 PM 
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Bruce Schneier quotes Jonathan Farley, math professor at Harvard: "The simplest reason is that we're all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960's when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other -- but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings -- the famous six degrees of separation -- for the package to reach its intended destination.
"Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.
"A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the 'strength of weak ties.' As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist."
"2008 pres"
6:08:21 PM
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New West: "About half of America's hunters and fishermen have seen first-hand the impact of global warming, according to a poll released Tuesday by the National Wildlife Federation. While the 1,000-plus sportsmen surveyed voted for by a 2-1 marging for President Bush, who has sought to dismiss global warming as an environmentalist exagerration, 71% said they were concerned about diminishing fish and wildlife populations and many had seen direct impacts of climate change in the field. They also rejected the Bush Administration's fossil-fuel-based energy policy and want more conservation and clean fuels.
"In another example of outdoorsmen flouting political categories, Wyoming union workers, led by the AFL-CIO, are protesting a planned BLM drilling lease sale in the Wyoming range. The Casper Star-Tribune reports that workers fear the loss of hunting and recreation lands that their families have used for generations - and with the state's economy in an historic boom period, the jobs that drilling projects bring aren't much of an issue."
ZDNet: "Scientists who've studied the issue now almost unanimously agree that the ocean levels will likely rise at least a half a meter by 2100, and possibly more if current temperature trends and energy use continue, according to John Harte, professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, speaking at the U.S.-China Symposium on Climate Change taking place at the school this week.
"The half-meter rise in sea levels, caused by a 3 to 5 degree increase in average global temperature, will lead to the loss of a few small island nations and severe impacts for places like Hong Kong. More intense and longer heat waves will lead to larger death counts than those seen in Europe during the summer in the past few years, Harte predicted. Polar bears will likely die off as their habitat vanishes."
"2008 pres"
6:02:59 PM
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Science Blog: "In another example, [University of Michigan physics associate professor Mark Newman] used the algorithm to sort a set of 1225 conservative and liberal political blogs based on the network of web links between them. When the network was fed through the algorithm, it divided cleanly into conservative and liberal camps. One community had 97 percent conservative blogs, and the other had 93 percent liberal blogs, indicating that conservative and liberal blogs rarely link to one another. In a further twist, the computer analysis was unable to find any subdivision at all within the liberal and conservative blog communities.
"'This behavior is unique in our experience among networks of this size and is perhaps a testament not only to the widely noted polarization of the current political landscape in the United States, but also to the strong cohesion of the two factions,' the paper stated. The network of blogs was compiled by another U-M professor, Prof. Lada Adamic of the U-M School of Information.
"Newman's methods have also been adapted by researchers working in molecular biology to study metabolic networks, the chemical networks that power cells in human and animal bodies. In a recent paper in the journal Nature, researchers Roger Guimerà and Luis Amaral from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., found that metabolites that straddle boundaries between groups in metabolic networks show persistence across species. Commenting on the work of Guimerà and Amaral, Newman says that this could be a sign that the division of the network into modules corresponds to different roles that metabolites play within the cell, and could suggest new directions for interpreting data on biochemical networks."
"2008 pres"
5:50:39 PM
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DemNotes: "The DNC announced today that the four cities to formally submit bids for the 2008 Democratic National Convention are: Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, and New Orleans. Each have their own unique positives and negatives, but the momentum really seems to be building for Denver. DailyKos has a poll online right now, and Denver is leading the pack by a wide margin, with 50% right now! Take a moment and register your choice at:
Daily Kos."
"2008 pres"
7:09:14 AM
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Don Surber: "In calling for more nukes, John McCain may have stumbled upon the issue that will power him to the presidency. America's need for energy independence is the only way to shorten this war on terrorism. Oil tends to flow to the dictators -- Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Venezeula, Iraq, Iran -- who use their riches to entrench themselves. It cannot continue."
"2008 pres"
7:07:02 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 11:34:18 AM.
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